Tag Archives: Protest

In addition to going dark, pixelhose staff participated in the San Francisco SOPA protest. Yes! We did show up in person – an odd feeling, like, oh, reading a paper book nowadays!

We are happy, no, make that ELATED to report that the “after-action” data are extremely positive. Here are some highlights, gleaned from various news sources:

Three US senators, including senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) withdrew his
support for SOPA/PIPA. Given the senator’s stature within the GOP, this is a
major blow to these incredibly, uh…, dumb is the only word that comes to
mind, bills.

The conservative Heritage Foundation announced its opposition to the
bills.

Last week only three senators opposed PIPA. As of this writing, 35
senators are publicly opposing the bill(s). The “magic number” – the number of
opposing votes needed to kill the bill in the US Senate – is 41.

These are all of course great first-time-out results for a community that had never come together for a political cause. But the SOPA problem is far from solved.

Next week, US Senate will try a floor vote on PIPA. We’ll of course will have multiple posts before then, hoping to give everyone more good reason to keep signing those online petitions and calling their US senators, PARTICULARLY senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) who is one of the bill’s co-sponsors and, so far, has refused to acknowledge the error of his ways.

In the meantime, we want to THANK everyone who supported the protest day, particularly those of you who also took time to send us emails expressing your support.

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As all of you probably are aware of, US Congress is considering two uniquely evil bills, SOPA (House) and PIPA (Senate), that make Chinese or Iranian censorship practices seem benevolent by comparison.

If these bills become law, they will not only summarily destroy free exchange of ideas on the net, but are likely to force a new, severely limiting, net-scale, information tracking architecture by immediately placing sites like Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, and WordPress in the cross-hairs of lawyers for the five largest Hollywood studios, the Recording Industry Association of America, and a handful of multinational media conglomerates – the primary forces behind these bills. One of the biggest proponents of these bills is Rupert Murdoch whose media organization, as well as his own personal role in the recent illegal phone hacking scandal is under investigation in both US and UK.

Hello? Kettle? This is pot…

To make sure our voices are heard over the katching-katching of money being poured into politicians’ campaigns by lobbyists, many of the web’s biggest destinations, such as Wikipedia, will go dark for 12 hours on Wed January 18th, 2012. While we are not quite the size of some of these big boys (well, not for a couple more years anyway) pixelhose.com will also join the strike and go dark that day.

PLEASE TAKE A QUICK MINUTE to make your voice heard. The web site AmericanCensorship.org will do all of the work for you! All you have to do is fill a form and they’ll take it from there. They’ve written up a template text, so all you have to do is scroll down the home page, fill out one of the two forms and hit “send”.

There is a form for those in the US – text will be forwarded to your representative based on your zip code.

There is ALSO a form for those NOT in the US – text will be forwarded to the US State Department.

For additional information on SOPA/PIPA see:

A 4 min video overview is here (be patient, this video is getting millions of hits)

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